"You got any hooch?"
"Some beer is all. I've been doing good, Dave. No little white pills, no glug-glug before I go to work. I can't believe how good I feel in the mornings."
"Pick me up at Sloppy Joe's."
"What do you want to go there for? It's full of college dopes who think Ernest Hemingway wrote on the bathroom walls or something."
"See you in an hour, kiddo. You're a sweet girl."
"Yeah, the guys at Smiling Jack's used to tell me that all the time. While they were trying to cop a feel under the table. I think you got hit in the head by lightning this morning."
When she came for me later at Sloppy Joe's, I was by myself at a table in the back, the breeze from a floor fan rising up my trouser leg, fluttering the wet sleeve of my seersucker coat that hung over the side of the table. The big sliding doors on two sides of the building were rolled wide open, and the neon light shone purple on the sidewalk. On the corner, two cops were rousting a drunk. They weren't cutting him any slack, either. He was going to the bag.
"Let's go, Lieutenant," Robin said.
"Wait till the Man leaves. My horizon keeps tilting. Key West is a bad town to have trouble in."
"All I do is flex my boobs and they tip their hats. Such gentlemen. No more booze, honey pie."
"I need to tell you some things. About my wife. Then you have to tell me some more about those people in New Orleans."
"Tomorrow morning. Mommy's going to fix you a steak tonight."
"They killed her."
"What?"
"They blew her to pieces with shotguns. That's what they did, all right."
She stared at me with her mouth parted. I could see the edges of her nostrils discolor.
"You mean Bubba Rocque killed your wife?" she said.
"Maybe it was him. Maybe not. Ole Bubba's a hard guy to second-guess."
"Dave, I'm sorry. Jesus Christ. Did it have something to do with me? God, I don't believe it."
"No."
"It does, though, because you're here."
"I just want to see if you can remember some things, Maybe I just wanted to see you, too."
"I guess that's why you had the hots for me when you were single. Tell me about it when your head's not ninety-proof." She looked around the bar. The floor fan ruffled her short black hair. "This place's a drag. The whole town's a drag. It's full of low-rent dykes and man-eaters that drift down from New York. Why'd you send me over here?"
"You told me you were doing well here."
"Who's doing well when people are out there killing a guy's wife? You messed with them, didn't you, Dave? You wouldn't listen to me."
I didn't answer, but instead picked up my highball glass.
"Forget it. Your milk cow has gone dry for tonight," she said, then took the glass out of my hand and poured it in a pool of whiskey and ice on the table.
She lived on the first floor of an old two-story stucco building with a red tile roof just off Duval Street. A huge banyan tree had cracked one wall, and the tiny yard was overgrown with weeds and untrimmed banana trees. Her apartment had a small kitchen, a bedroom separated by a sliding curtain, and a couch, breakfast table, and chairs that looked like they had come from a Goodwill store.
Robin had a good heart, and she wanted to be kind, but her cooking was truly a challenge, particularly to someone on a bender. She turned the steak black on one side, fried the potatoes in a half-inch of grease, and filled the apartment with smoke and the smell of burned onions. I tried to eat but couldn't. I'd reached the bottom of my drunk. The cogs on my wheels were sheared smooth, all my wiring was blown, and the skin of my face was thick and dead to the touch. I suddenly felt that I had aged a century, that someone had slipped a knife along my breastbone and scooped out all my vital organs.
"Are you going to be sick?" she said.
"No, I just need to go to bed."
She looked at me a moment in the light of the unshaded bulb that hung from the ceiling. Her eyes were green, and unlike most of the strippers on Bourbon, she had never needed to wear false eyelashes. She brought two sheets from her dresser in the bedroom and spread them on the couch. I sat down heavily, took off my shoes, and rubbed my hand in my face. I was already starting to dehydrate, and I could smell the alcohol against my palm like an odor climbing out of a dark well. She carried a pillow back to the couch.
"Robin?" I said.
"What are you up to, Lieutenant?" She looked down at me with the light behind her head.
I put my hand on her wrist. She sat down beside me and looked straight ahead. Her hands were folded, and her knees were close together under her black waitress uniform.
"Are you sure this is what you want?" she said.
"Yes."
"Did you come all the way over here just to get laid? There must be somebody available closer to home."
"You know that's not the way I feel about you."
"No, I don't. I don't know anything of the sort, Dave. But you're a friend, and I wouldn't turn away from you. I just don't want you to lie about it."
She turned off the light and undressed. Her breasts were round and soft against me, her skin tan and smooth in the dark. She hooked one leg in mine, ran her hands over my back, kissed my cheek and breathed in my ear and made love to me as she might to an emotional child. But I didn't care. I was used up, finished, as dead inside as I was the day they slid Annie's casket inside the crypt. The street light made shadows on the banyan and banana trees outside the window. Inside my head was a sound like the roar of the ocean in a conch shell.
The next morning the early light was gray in the streets, then the sun came up red on the eastern horizon, and the banana leaves clicking against the screen window were beaded with humidity. I filled a quart jar with tap water, drank it down, then threw up in the toilet. My hands shook, the backs of my legs quivered, flashes of color popped like lesions behind my eyes. I stood in my underwear in front of the washbasin, cupped water into my face, brushed my teeth with toothpaste and my finger, then threw up again and went into a series of stomach spasms so severe that finally my saliva was pink with blood in the bottom of the basin. My eyes were watering uncontrollably, my face cold and twitching; there was a pressure band across one side of my head as though I had been slapped with a thick book, and my breath was sour and trembled in my throat each time I tried to breathe.
I wiped the sweat and water off my face with a towel and headed for the icebox.
"No help there, hon," Robin said from the stove, where she was soft-boiling eggs. "I poured the beer out at four this morning."
"Have you got any ups?"
"I told you mommy's clean." She was barefoot and wearing a pair of black shorts and a denim shirt that was unbuttoned over her bra.
"Some of those PMS pills. Come on, Robin. I'm not a junkie. I've just got a hangover."
"You shouldn't try to run a shuck on another juicer. I took your wallet, too. You got rolled, Lieutenant."
It was going to be a long morning. And she was right about trying to con a pro. Normally an alcoholic can jerk just about anybody around except another drunk. And Robin knew every ploy that I might use to get another drink.
"Get in the shower, Dave," she said. "I'll have breakfast ready when you come out. You like bacon with soft-boiled eggs?"
I turned on the water as hot as I could stand it, pointed my face with my mouth open into the shower head, washed the cigarette smoke from the bar out of my hair, scrubbed my skin until it was red. Then I turned on the cold water full blast, propped my arms against the tin walls of the stall, and held on while I counted slowly to sixty.